From the article: “We also included the estimated cost of housing and food listed by each school, although this total is not factored in to the ranking because it can often look different for students who live at home with family or in off-campus housing.
In creating this list, we used rankings from US News & World Report, The College Investor, and Best Colleges, which we confirmed using each school’s official tuition listings for the school year 2025-2026.”
Of note, the cost to educate a student has been reported as greater than the full list price at some colleges. In such cases, all students are subsidized to greater or lesser levels.
Thank you for noting this statement from the article.
Per CDS, at Vassar, 332 of 641 or 52% of first years received aid. 1416 of 2597 in total received aid or 54.5%. Still healthy but not 2/3.
Now contrast if you’re a kid at a school not on the list but Wake, with tuition alone over $70k so similar to these but only 253 of 1389 or 18% of first years get need aid. I have to imagine the dynamic of who kids hang out with is different. I’d imagine it is at Vassar too as near half are paying full freight.
I would think that campus life generally follows real life - when people get into their like groupings
thanks
Many students at top schools like Vassar come in with some outside merit scholarships, and many instate may have New York State regents scholarships. So the number paying full fee may be lower than some believe. Will be interesting to see what happens with the international students this year.
eta: and to repeat, as noted upthread, none of us had any idea, with the exception of a few very obvious well known last names, who was a scholarship student and who was not. We made friends with roommates, classmates, lab partners, card players, you name it. it had nothing to do with “likes sticking with their own kind.”
Tuition & Fees ← Financial Aid ← Admission ← Vassar College .
“Around two thirds of Vassar students receive financial aid and the average Vassar scholarship award is $56,923. We are committed to making a Vassar education affordable by meeting 100% of the demonstrated financial need of all admitted students.”
I do think is unfair to compare a graduate of 1980 or 1990 to need practices today. Schools are vastly different today in how aid works. So I’m not sure a 30 or 40 or 50 year reunion is reflective of a student body today in regard to background and wealth.
Go back a decade from your timeframe. There were no Pell Grants (established in 1973) , no Questbridge, and likely the only “first gen” on campus was the son of a custodian, who was using the employee tuition benefit to pay for college while living at home. Many colleges had quotas on Black, Jewish, students, and of course nobody had to worry about women at Princeton or Yale since they were single sex.
Seems like the attention colleges now pay to kids from low income homes and diverse families is GREATER, not less. Why is that problematic?
Who said it was problematic ?
I was simply pointing out that going to a 40 or 50 year reunion and comparing those grads to today’s is likely an invalid comparison.
Someone said when they were at a reunion, no one knew….
I’m saying - different era…that’s all.
I agree - it is greater (the focus). Back then money talked - even moreso than today. That was my point.
Wasn’t making a statement beyond you can’t compare a class from 1980 or 1990 with 2025.
Gotcha and thanks for clarifying.
I will note that colleges (typically public U’s) that offer tiered housing with tiered pricing are doing a terrible disservice to campus life overall and to low income students specifically. My opinion only of course. Folk on CC like to complain that the dorms at Brown are shabby, the colleges at Yale range from “old and musty” to “a little newer but still musty”, etc. And of course, there is nothing to stop the children of a billionaire from renting an apartment off-campus and paying market rent with as many amenities as they an find.
But to tour a flagship U- paid for by your own tax dollars- and to see the income stratification that goes with tiered dorm pricing- ugh. At least a lottery system, or random roommate placing has some level of fairness. I lived in pretty terrible dorms in college until senior year when I had a bad lottery number and in order to get a single, I had to sign up for a substance free dorm. It was pretty luxe! But that was random too.
And just because some of us have gone to recent reunions, doesn’t mean we aren’t in the pipeline to read the numbers of where our donations are going. Or what’s happening on campus now. And just as students got state merit scholarships in the past, they are getting state merit scholarships presently. Even if hypothetically there might have been less diversity then than now (maybe yes maybe no, don’t know for sure), the reality is nobody cared. Nobody asked or knew how much money anybody had. Nobody asked who was on scholarship and the only way we might have known if someone was getting any FA benefit was maybe if they had a campus job. Maybe. But again now, just as then, nobody cared. Trying to imply otherwise is offensive. It’s even more offensive to make implications about a school or an experience one has never had and contrast that with one who has. Ironically, all housing costs are equal, some dorms are in better shape than others, but students enter with dorm room assignments that are doubles, triples or quads. The community is diverse and students intermingle. It is not the typical student that would choose the college because they thought they could get a private room.
Private universities can offer different dorm pricing too. Particularly when housing is cobbled together over the years and can differ from dorm to dorm, with different amenities etc, I can certainly see a rationale for this. I also suspect that if all dorms were priced uniformly the lowest income students would end up paying more than what they are currently paying?
And many colleges, both public and private, require non-local freshmen (and sometimes sophomores) to live on campus.
One should be careful of stating generalizations and assumptions as facts. Any comparisons of student experience not from first hand knowledge are of limited benefit to the community and should be acknowledged. Obviously the more recent the better, but as long as the timeframe of personal experience is referenced the readers can decide for themselves.
This conversation should move on before devolving into further debate, which is against ToS. Thank you for your understanding.
You often need wealthy families to pay the high sticker price in order to support the college being no cost to parents for typical lower income families and lower cost than in-state publics for typical middle income families. At many of these colleges ~half of families are full pay, so if they drop the sticker price for the wealthy half, then they need to increase cost for the other not-wealthy half to make up for the lost revenue.
Rather than a discount furniture store, the price can be more of a sliding scale, like taxes. For example, Princeton’s NPC suggests the following cost to parents, as expressed as % of AGI, among families without large assets. The higher the income, the higher the % of that income that goes to college costs, until reaching full pay of $92k/year at $466k income.
So back to topic… It is interesting to me that 2 of the Claremont colleges (CMC and Harvey Mudd) are on this list, but the other 3 (Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps) are not. Perhaps their costs are only a bit less (dunno, didn’t check) but at the very least it shows that there are additional differences between the Claremont colleges.
I saw Scripps ranked #1 for costs on a list a couple of years ago, and it didn’t even make this list at all. There are more than 25 schools in the “breathtakingly-expensive” category, and the gradations that put some on the list and others not are in the noise relative to said breathtaking cost.
while the fees of the schools on this list are outrageous, it’s important to remember the impact of tuition discounting. To add to the table I posted above, average tuition discounting rate is now over 50% at many schools. Thus, what the “sticker price” is not relevant for many students attending these schools.
I don’t think you can make any generalizations based on cost. I know first hand schools that aren’t on this list that feel way more “country club-ish” than some of these schools. Throw in greek life and you can get some very polarized socioeconomic distribution at many schools.
I have to admit to being surprised to see some schools on this list - Kenyon for example, which has a 30% acceptance rate and is in a rural part of OH that doesn’t have a high cost of living.
I actually think the costs of public U’s (many of them) are outrageous. USC is high priced? Doesn’t bother me in the least. The reality that a two income household in PA cannot afford Penn State (and I know people like this- a social worker married to a librarian– professionals with Master’s degrees and they can’t send their kid to the flagship?) bothers me.
There are lots of private things that folks can’t afford- country clubs, fine dining restaurants, fancy cocktails, designer clothes. I don’t lose sleep over that. But when it’s our tax dollars???
Good points, @blossom The COA at many schools is just crazy for many schools, and as @momofboiler1 brought up, additional fees like the cost of participating in greek life takes them even more off the rails. Enrollment management has become a science for many schools. In some cases they can cherry pick students and determine just what it takes to get them to attend.
